E-Commerce Marketing: Backlinking As A Marketing Strategy

Backlinking is a marketing strategy where you ask other sites to link to yours in the hopes to gain traffic to your website. In e-commerce, you have have to be careful what sites link to yours. Backlinking should not be your primary marketing strategy. Creating a great store, with great content, and building your reputation in your chosen niche should be first as well as any on-page SEO strategies. These strategies you have control over. Then, should you have some time to establish marketing backlinks, keep the following strategies in mind.

When trying to establish a backlink, know the difference between a quality link vs. ‘simply a link’ is key. It’s a common mistake to exchange links with any business or website, but there’s a lot more to it than simply dropping your link and waiting for the visitors to roll in. You have to be choosy and dedicated to see the kind of results you’re aiming for. Stay away from link farms. Link farms just collect links, and sometimes charge a small fee to get listed. They often do more harm than good as they quality of sites on these pages are often suspect, and you may get lumped in with them.

The best way to choose a link is to find sites that complement your own. An exact match is not ideal because these sites are generally your competition. You want to find someone that sells products either in your industry or a complementary one. For example, if you sell bridal gowns, you’d do well to set up linking with a tuxedo shop or limo service. However, linking up with a shop that sells business ebooks would not be a lucrative move for your business. It does create a backlink to your site, but would drive visitors that are more interested in business ebooks than bridal gowns.

As a rule of thumb, always research who you are considering exchanging links with to be sure the links will be quality ones. You’re looking for relevance coupled with a high page rank. You want to avoid going into it blindly, exchanging only because the other site is run by a friend, etc. This is your business and maintaining your marketing efforts with professionalism is how you’ll get the best results!